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The Snow Shoe Bike Bunch just happened over the course of the last few years, my first introduction to the them was when we opened our garage up to some of the neighborhood kids and began working and building twenty-inch trash-bikes to take out and bash through the old strip mine areas. As that spring turned into summer, the garage slowly began to fill with old bike parts, new bike parts and an ever-evolving collection of twenty-inch bikes in various stages of being saved and/or improved. The garage also turned into the unofficial place to hang out. Our dedication to trying to find decent bicycles and parts slowly began to pay off and we have to thank some of the local residents for having the want to rid themselves of a bicycle or two, and the kind-hearted generosity to let us have the parts they did!
The bike that started it all: Although we had been doing pretty good with slapping together half-decent coaster brake bikes, when a certain Mrs Hall donated the skeletal remains of a 1998 Schwinn Super Stock 2, that's when we began the real learning curve of just what a real BMX bike was all about! In the week or two after we got the Super Stock up and running, we realized that we needed to set some higher goals, and the effort to find, build, and ride a lighter-weight, free-wheeled, gyro-equiped bicycles truly began. Here's a pick of the SS2 as it sits today, it's not riden alot because it's in desperate need of a straighter rear rim -it has a flairing flaw. So it rests for a little while we continue to search for the right stinger seat and front fork and those impossible to find downtube decals. We'd really like to retire this one and leave in better shape than we found it.
The reason we began a curved ramp is because we wanted to up instead of out. Now, why it is I never stopped to seriously consider that goal is beyond me. The few hints that we had from the internet sketch suggested that as a finished ramp it should have a minimum of seven layers of plywood. So, I bought a four layer sheet, a three layer sheet and the five layer sheet which would be the side and back support. It also needed several 2x4s. Everything got cut to the pre-described dimensions for a 3-foot tall "entrance" ramp and the work proceeded without any hiccups until it came time to determine the curve--perhaps "angle of incidence" would be more prophetic.
We had the 3-foot back support cut to length and 2x4s at the ready, when we had to determine the shape of the curve for the sides. What we didn't have was a protractor, a mathematician, or a clue, so failing all that we found a somewhat flat area, held the 3-foot tall back piece up and tacked one end of the six foot long 3-ply sheet to the top of the back piece, but the plywood sheet didn't bend at all, well, okay, maybe it drooped a little, so we attached the 2x4 runners (now 2x2) cross-wise as instructed to it to give it more weight, tacked it back up, and it still didn't curve much. What we had then was a 3-foot tall ramp with a kind of droopy six-foot run. We took turns holding it together and backing away to see the slant, and the consensus opinion was: "Nope, it needs more curve."
If we could figure out the curve all we had to do was lean the side sheet up against the ramp and trace it out with a marker, but we just couldn't think of how to get the sheet to curve until I realized that since there was four of us building this thing, one of us could be spared. We got the smallest one of us to creep up on the non-droopy plywood sheet until his weight and angle finally got the plywood to bend, when he found the one spot where it curved the most, we leaned one side sheet up, traced the curve with a marker and then began to cut the curve out with the circular saw. Just in case you don't know, cutting a curve out of a sheet of plywood with a circular saw isn't the brightest thing in the world to attempt, as a matter of fact, I would highly recommend that you might not try it all unless you have the appropriate training, safety equipment, and replacement saw blades,....Since cutting out the first curved side-support ruined the saw blade, there really wasn't really any choice left but to go ahead and cut the other side out, besides, we could always cover the scorch marks up with some paint.
Now, the sides were cut, attached to the back, support runners tagged in, and it actually began to look like a ramp! When we finished with all the supports we went for the 4-ply sheet to lay on top of what we already had. Now, here's one more thing we should have thought of: If it's hard to bend a 3-ply sheet of plywood, then wouldn't a 4-ply sheet be harder to bend? It was harder to bend, a lot harder, it took a combination of all four of us sitting on it to get the second sheet to match the first, but we did it, and once we had finished it we stood back to admire our work. I highly recommend stepping back to admire your work at anytime during the process of building a bicycle launch ramp, as matter of fact I would suggest that you step back and admire your work as early in the process as possible. Stepping back to admire your work early and often gives you many more opportunities for cognitive thoughts to pass through your brain, and the more cognitive thoughts you have, and the earlier you have them gives you a far better chance of using that perfectly good lumber for something far more intelligent. Stepping back to admire it when it's finished, like I did, is far too late.
The ramp was finished, it was ready, and I had built it. It was in my driveway, made from my wood, my lag bolts, and what had been my circular saw blade,... so there wasn't really any debate, I would have to be the first one over it, besides, I was the heaviest and the oldest. Now, a 6-foot long, 3-foot high, 4-foot wide bicycle launch ramp is a big thing, I mean physically it's a big thing, it takes two if not three people to drag it around and position it correctly. Even after you shift it this way or that way until you think it's in the right spot to get a good run at it, it's still a big thing. What's really strange about these ramps are there ability to continue to look really big the further you get from them. They never really seem to get any smaller at all. They just loom at you. Sometimes, especially when you haven't yet gone over them yet, they seem to actually grow in size. The ramp looked really big when I rode away from it, and it looked large when I stopped and looked back at it, and looked just as large the closer I peddled toward it, and I peddled toward it often. Most of the time I stopped well before it, turned around and after peddling some distance would turn to see if had gotten any smaller. It didn't.
Now there are, I am sure, an awful lot of things that should fly, like say, birds, airplanes and footballs, but not necessarily forty-year-old men on twenty-inch bicycles. We just aren't all that graceful when we do fly, and fly is what you do for a few a long, drawn-out, slow-motion seconds when you leave the top of a 3-foot tall bicycle launch ramp. It was a pretty neat feeling floating through the air, until I realized what advantages long, flat-angled bicycle ramps have over tall curved ones. Oddly enough, when you are flying through the air on a bicycle off a three-foot-tall launch ramp, you do have the time to think these things through. Somewhere in between all those panicky thoughts of speed, angle, foot position, quickly oncoming earth and whether or not you sent in the homeowner's insurance payment on time, you have an eternity to consider all of the other bikes ramps of your life. As I was flying I realized that the big difference in flat ramps and curved ramps is that when you leave a long, flat-angled ramp on a bicycle the world as you know it stays pretty much where it's suppose to be and gravity as you have always experienced it works just the way it's supposed to. Leaving a long flat-angled ramp is a little bit like running across the yard and jumping as far as you can on foot. You go up, the world stays put, and you land. This is not what happens when you leave a curved launch ramp. The severity of the curve throws you and the bicycle into a curve of your own making, as the two of you travel through space gravity persists as usual, but the so does the angle of incidence and you gently begin to roll into the air. Now, this is what we wanted to have happen, we wanted to go up instead of out, but the disquieting thing about rolling into the air is that you are subverting that old friend gravity who has, up until this moment, always been there to keep your bicycle and it's pedals closely underfoot. It's a little tiny bit distracting (not too mention way too late) to finally comprehend Newton's ideas of bodies in motion when you're desperately trying to figure out how to land a flying bicycle that's slowly rotating out from underneath you.
A parachute instructor may have considered my tuck-and-roll landing to have been pretty decent, and I felt none the worse from it, unfortunately the bike wasn't as lucky. If you have been wondering why bicycle companies have been adding more and more spokes to the wheels of twenty-inch bicycles, let alone making the rims with two and three layers thick,...well, there are good reasons for it. The 28-spoke single-wall rim temporary affixed to the bike I was on simply could not take the force of the landing. It had it's own rendezvous with physics and the wheel buckled, or "taco-ed"--the darn thing folded over like a potato-chip in hot oil.
So, that was the scene, a brand new 3-foot launch ramp, a bike with a busted back wheel in a pile on the lawn with myself sitting there picking grass blades out of my teeth and hair. I took that opportunity to reconsider what we had built and, of course, to find another rear wheel. What I should have done was gone and found the bike helmet, it may have saved me from some of the grass picking, not to mention the bizarre thought process that came next. We swapped out the the bent back wheel and kicked around a lot of ideas about what might be wrong with the ramp. The kid's conclusion was that perhaps it wasn't the severity of the ramp so much as where we had placed it. We had, after all sat it on a nice flat surface to get the most lift we could get, but they suggested that if were placed it on a downhill slope, that then maybe the initial angle wouldn't be so bad, and in my unhelmeted state, I actually agreed with them. The four of us huffed the ramp around to the downhill side of a bank in the side yard..
Joey, one of the kids next door, riding the Super Stock 2, decided he would try the ramp next, besides, he was younger, faster, more agile, that and I wasn't really all that keen to ever go over it again. He started at the top of the hill in the yard. He took several test rides up to it, stopped and rode back up the hill. Finally he decided that he had summoned up enough of whatever it takes to make decisions like this and peddled toward the ramp. Only he just wasn't peddling fast enough,... or perhaps the lawn's grass (tasty as it was) may have been slowing him down. Whatever it was, he hit the 3-foot tall ramp with just enough momentum to roll him ever so slowly over so that he landed pretty much on the back of his neck and shoulders with the bike on top of him. The good new was that he had completed his first one-eighty. The bad news was, he did it in completely the wrong direction! He was alright though, and as far as the ramp went, it was winning, we were 0 for two.
It was about that time when one of the other older neighborhood kids came by on a 26-inch full suspension mountain bike. He took some interest in what we doing, peddled up, paused for a moment at the ramp and then proceeded up the to the top of the hill. He turned around, came down the hill, over the ramp, landed the bike, and ta-da, rode back by us saying "that was kewl!" and headed back off to wherever he had been going before he had gotten so sidetracked. At least then we knew that you could go over the ramp and land a bike without any injuries, so we looked at the ramp for another hour trying to figure out what to do with it. Finally we all came to same conclusion. It was just too darn tall. This was about the time that my wife came home, and to this day relates the incidence of that afternoon as one of the more unusual things she has ever witnessed. "It's just that it doesn't happen," she says "finding three or four of the males of the species standing around looking at something they built and discussing how exactly to make it smaller,..."
With a dull saw blade and some sore muscles we gritted our green teeth and whacked a good eight inches off the height of the ramp. There was a certain amount of pleasure in doing this. There was also a general sigh of relief, and with a much less severe angle of inncidence, another back wheel, a concensus feeling that "that ramp doesn't look nearly so bad now" we hurled ourselves over the shortened launch ramp with considerable success.
Now I suppose some people would suggest that it was familiarity that made us start thinking about building a second ramp, a taller ramp, a ramp like the way we built the first one,... but I don't think it was familiarity, I think it was more saftey equipment. There is just something about a helmet's taunt chin strap that makes you want to go faster and higher,...so a year later we began the tabletop and the second ramp!
Here is the first half of the tabletop with the new second ramp included:
